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At least the first “Joker” movie, Todd Phillips’s 2019 origin story of the Gotham villain as antihero, had the bravado to take its protagonist’s revolt to noxious extremes. The abused, neglected, and damaged Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix)—accursed as son, lover, and comedian—takes violent revenge that quickly wins him fans and followers. The movie’s spirit of antiplutocratic revolt is inspired by right-wing vigilante injustice; it’s a fascistic fantasy dressed up in egalitarian righteousness. In Phillips’s new sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” he walks back the hectic ideology that gave that earlier movie its energy, however dubious; the sequel is merely innocuous, grandiose in its scale of production but minor in its dramatic substance.
“Folie à Deux” finds Arthur locked up in Arkham Asylum for the murders that he committed in the earlier film—three assailants on the subway, a former colleague, and a TV host, whom he kills live on the air—and awaiting trial on capital charges. (He’s responsible for a sixth killing, of his mother, to which he freely admits but for which he hasn’t been charged.) Arthur is the celebrity of the place, and he’s got the help of a capable lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), who has a plan to spare him the death penalty. She intends to portray him as not responsible for his acts, on the ground that he has a split personality resulting from the abuse that he endured in childhood—Arthur is the mild-mannered comedian, Joker the enraged killer who takes over at times of crisis. But before the case gets to court Arthur’s personal life shifts: at a music-therapy group session, he meets Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a patient who’s an expressive and enthusiastic singer and is also a fan of his. Arthur and Lee quickly fall in love and, helped by sympathetic guards, forge a relationship which she resourcefully manages to deepen in the course of his trial, even as Arthur’s self-presentation as mentally ill, according to Maryanne’s strategy, tests the couple’s bond. (Along the way, Lee morphs into the character of Harley Quinn.)
The mainspring of “Folie à Deux” is music. In “Joker,” it was established that Arthur used to watch classic Hollywood musicals on TV with his mother. “Folie à Deux” displays the imagination formed by that experience: Arthur’s inner life expresses itself in terms of song and dance, in sequences that range from intimate duets with Lee to mighty production numbers on grandiose sets with large casts and flamboyant action. Where “Joker” was largely inspired by Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” the templates for “Folie à Deux” are James Thurber’s story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (published in The New Yorker in 1939), in which a suburban businessman’s mundane daily life inspires wild fantasies of which he’s the hero, and “Pennies from Heaven,” Dennis Potter’s 1978 TV series starring Bob Hoskins, in which the protagonist, a sheet-music salesman, expresses his fantasies by lip-synching to classic-era pop records in staged musical productions. In Phillips’s film, there’s no lip-synching; rather, Phoenix (who’s hardly a trained singer) and Gaga (who’s among the most distinctive pop singers) actually sing.
That singing is one of the highly publicized aspects of the movie’s production: Gaga and Phoenix perform live, on the set, as the cameras roll. (They’re not lip-synching to their own pre-recordings, as is often done in movie musicals.) Some of the singing is on an intimate scale, in tight spaces and closeups, and Gaga does more than scale down her voice—she deglamorizes it, and even does so throughout, removing much of the vocal sheen and splendor in favor of a less professional finish. Strangely, the results come off as a directorial affectation, a willful cramping of her style. Moreover, the other prime aspects of these musical scenes, from their orchestral or big-band backing to the glossy pomp of their filming, counteract the spontaneity, the intimacy, the subjectivity, and the immediacy that the vocal performances are designed to convey. Whether the musical numbers feign realism (as when Arthur imagines strutting his stuff in the asylum’s common room) or range deep into fantasy (as in a mock wedding with a jazz-club gig attached to it), Phillips stays on the surface and lends them little physicality, little flair to match the songs.
The filming of music and dance may even be closer to the graphic abstractions and wild impossibilities of comic-book art than is the filming of action, however vigorous or violent, but the musical images in “Folie à Deux” fall far short of a comprehensive visual conception; they’re largely just commonplace visual recordings that, despite elaborate sets, offer little sense of style. (The booming instrumental accompaniments, submerging the singers’ voices into their enveloping textures, don’t help, either.) It’s as if Phillips were satisfied with evoking the idea of musical fantasy scenes and provided them with little identity of their own. His previous films haven’t been hallmarks of cinematic lyricism, either, but the tight tethering of the “Folie à Deux” fantasies to the plot, their prime role in displaying the protagonist’s states of mind, renders these sequences all the more prosaic.
The failure of “Folie à Deux” to get more from its two great lead actors than merely emblematic displays of emotion says as much about movies based on comic books, and about genre films as such, as about Phillips’s directorial choices. With their simplistic plotting, bare-bones psychology, and starkly plot-advancing dialogue, comic-book adaptations are made for the rough-and-ready B-movie or TV productions that they received decades ago—yet few directors not named Orson Welles could conjure on a low budget the extravagant universe of visual art that makes comic books so enticing. The films’ elaborate, likely expensive realizations, however, tend to govern the results: because the movies are costly to make, and because they must cater above all to the source material’s fans, the most important artistic decision-making is shifted, for commercial reasons, from the set to the boardroom. The anticipation of fans talmudically parsing details over the course of multiple films in a series gives rise to direction of overemphatic literalism. When a guard shaves Arthur to prepare him for a meeting with Maryanne (since an inmate can’t be trusted with a razor), he nicks the corner of Arthur’s mouth, and the tiny trickle of blood might as well get an operatic aria of its own, so blatantly is it emphasized. Fear the worst: I won’t spoil it, but when that trickle makes its reappearance, it’s in a scene of great dramatic moment that the underlined detail grossly cheapens and vulgarizes.
“Folie à Deux” is also a brutal story, involving wanton violence and cruel inflictions. The movie’s one scene of true horror involves sexual abuse, a sequence that’s appalling to see in its allusive generalities and to imagine in its undepicted specifics. This scene stands out for the anguish that Phillips puts into it, and that stands out in another regard, too—its seeming detachment from the action that precedes it and follows it. Even this noteworthy and emotion-charged scene can’t help but seem dispensed from a cinematic machine designed not to convey an experience beyond reason but to produce a commodity called darkness.
The film doesn’t let its events unfold organically; it pastes them onto the screen with a demonstrative obviousness. There’s one moment that sticks in mind as an authentic touch of life: when Lee, a minimum-security patient, meets Arthur, whose maximum-security protocol requires him to have his hands cuffed behind his back even in the music group—and, from his handcuffs, he extends a single finger to her for a handshake. In contrast, scenes of intensely expressed emotion (as when Arthur, alone in the asylum courtyard, lets loose with loud and anguished sounds that could be laughing or crying) feel calculated—in particular, for the display of actorly effort. Phillips has his cast strain for effect, but neither the script nor the filming rises to their exertions. In one major courtroom scene, Arthur speaks with an odd set of highly theatrical accents that are as accomplished in their eccentricity as they are detached not only from the film at large and the specifics of the scene but from Phoenix himself, who seems almost disembodied, filmed with a perfunctory inattention to physical presence. The movie feels not just planned but decided, and what happens while the camera rolls comes off as an afterthought.
The theatre of the American courtroom, with the sense that a trial is a ritual performed according to a rigid set of conventions instead of a free reconstruction and exploration of the events in question (see recent French courtroom dramas by way of comparison), gives rise to the movie’s most sharply outlined crisis: whether Arthur will go along with Maryanne, his lawyer, in her effort to portray him as a divided personality. On the one hand, Arthur is on trial for his life; on the other, Arthur’s very identity, his sense of the self that he’s willing to project publicly, is at stake in the proceedings. The script was written by Phillips and Scott Silver, and this idea is their boldest inspiration. It offers much to ponder—and far too much to speculate on, because the movie does little to detail its implications, does little with Arthur’s own quandaries. The musical numbers don’t help—instead of illuminating his inner life, they turn it into a spectacle.
There’s a political side to the matter of Arthur’s identity. His Joker persona is a celebrity, even the focus of a cult of personality—and the movie, pivoting on Arthur whipping up a crowd with the declaration “You’re fired!,” is conspicuously alluding to an autocratic apprenticeship. Yet he seems afflicted by pangs of conscience over the uses to which his fans put his fame—and his efforts to escape from it involve making use of it again. From the start, the Arthur of “Joker: Folie à Deux” is a troubled antihero; the fault lines of his inner crisis are admirably drawn but they remain undeveloped, and his conflicts diluted for easy consumption. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
